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Hi, all! Thanks go to Delilah for allowing me to take over her blog on this Wednesday.

I’m going to talk about my penchant for using unusual supernatural beings in my exciting new release No Ordinary Fairy. I will also give you the opportunity to win an ebook of the novella and an Amazon gift card!

Whenever I set out to write a story I first look around to myth and fairy tales to see what people or elements I could utilize that are a little fresher. I have nothing against vampires and werewolves and do include them in my stories, but I feel like they’ve had their place in the sun. So instead, I look for unusual creatures who don’t normally grace the pages of fiction.

For No Ordinary Fairy, which is a novella setting the stage for a shifter war series I turned to Polish myths and the stories of the Vila/Vilas, who are supposedly deadly…but I think they’re misunderstood. Pani, the heroine of NOF, is one such being. She is just trying to live a quiet life when she encounters Rafe, a gorgeous mountain lion shifter who has lost his ability to shift. Vila are not normally written in paranormal romance, which is one of the things that appealed to me about them. There are so many tales about them: that they are the spirits of women who had died. Alternatively, they have control over the winds, and make the earth shake from the force of their magic. When angered, they will entrance and dance men to death.

Whew! Some kind of fairy, huh? I hope that you enjoy Pani and Rafe as much as I enjoyed writing them. They are the first story in a larger series arc that will take the shifters in this world to the point of war. I will be looking for other unusual and interesting paranormals in the years to come. There are so many! If I could write about them all I would, but I’d need unlimited time. It’s times like these I wish I were one of my immortal Elementals.

Here is a taste of No Ordinary Fairy:

She felt a tug again, a presence to the right, deeper into the woods. There was something else too, a spirit she couldn’t identify. Not a shifter. Pani focused. She could feel shifter birds and foxes scattered around the area, but those weren’t what drew her attention. It felt like a shifter, but not a shifter, and its signature danced on the wind like a blast of cold Arctic air.

“Rafe, do you sense that?”

He looked at her with a dash of gold in his green eyes. For a moment, the cat looked at her, pleading, begging her to release it. He lifted his head and sniffed, so like a cat that she felt the presence of the lion surround her. Her Vila flowed out, the crown of gleaming gemstones beginning to take shape on her head. If she could reach the cat, maybe she could free it.

There was a mournful howl, unearthly and shrill, from somewhere in the distance.

“That’s not a coyote. Or a wolf,” Rafe said. “That sounds almost human, but not like any human I’ve met.”

Using her summoned Vila senses, Pani flowed out toward the sound, but could find no trail to lead her to the noise. It, and the strange sense of malevolence, vanished. She tested the air, trying to capture the feeling of the “other” so she could identify it again. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

Rafe growled deep in his throat and she turned back to him.

“Do you have any of your abilities?” she asked, looking up at him to see frustration crawl across his face.

His fists clenched and his body was so tight she thought his muscles might explode.

“I still have better reflexes, and acute senses of smell and hearing. I have enhanced tracking, superior to any human. But I can’t shift. My cat paces around inside me, but he can’t get out.”

He ground his teeth and he slammed one fist into another. He looked over at her with those eyes so like the color of her favorite forest trees.

“I thought you would know where he was. You’re a Vila. You like dogs.” He looked at her for a long minute. “You’re supposed to make men want to follow you anywhere, but you don’t seem to be that dangerous.”

Pani looked at him, glad he didn’t have psychic ability, glad that his powers were diminished at the moment. If he hadn’t been stunted, she wondered if he’d be able to smell the past on her, the wrongness of what had happened.

Of what she’d had to do.

Contest

Want to win a ebook of No Ordinary Fairy as well as a $10 Amazon gift card? Just leave a comment on my Facebook author page between now and the end of the month, and I will draw one random name as the lucky winner. As always I welcome feedback. If you care to drop me a line either at my website (www.clairedavon.com) or on my Facebook author page.